Page 26 (2/2)

Bond tucked the light back in his belt

Above him the surface of the sea was a canopy of quicksilver It crackled softly like fat frying in a saucepan Ahead the linted down into the deep crooked valley that sloped down and away on the route he had to follow He left his sheltering tree of coral and walked softly forward Noas not so easy The light was tricky and bad and the petrified forest of the coral reef was full of culs-de-sac and te avenues

Soet over a tangled scrub of tree- and antler-coral and when this happened he profited by it to check his position with the h the broken water Soave hi that the sed knob protruding above the surface Then he would focus his eyes on the phosphorescent scribbles of the ht-life and perceive whole colonies and populations about theirfish about, but e and prehistoric in the lared redly at hi spined antennae asked him for the password Occasionally they scuttled nervously backwards into their shelters, their powerful tails kicking up the sand, and crouched on the tips of their eight hairy feet, waiting for the danger to pass Once the great streauese man-of-war floated slowly by They almost reached his head from the surface, fifteen feet away, and he re from the contact of one of their tendrils that had burned for three of his days at Manatee Bay If they caught a reen and speckledyellow and black snakes along patches of sand, the green ones baring their teeth from some hole in the rock, and several West Indian blowfish, like broith huge soft green eyes He poked at one with the end of his gun and it swelled out to the size of a football and becaerous white spines Wide sea fans swayed and beckoned in the eddies, and in the grey valleys they caught the light of the ments of the shrouds of men buried at sea Often in the shadows there were unexplained, heavy e eyes at once extinguished Then Bond would whirl round, thuun, and stare back into the darkness But he shot at nothing and nothing attacked hih the reef

The hundred yards of coral took hih and rested on a round luerhead, he was glad that nothing but a hundred yards of grey-white water lay in front of him He still felt perfectly fresh and the elation and clarity of auntlet of hazards through the reef had been a constant fret, with the risk of tearing his rubber skin always on his mind Now the forest of razor-blade coral was behind, to be exchanged for shark and barracuda or perhaps a sudden stick of dynamite dropped into the centre of the little flower of his bubbles on the surface

It hile he was ot hi with his feet on the sand and suddenly they were manacled to the base of the round toadstool of coral on which he was resting Even as he realized what had happened a tentacle began to snake up his leg and another one, purple in the diave a start of fear and disgust and at once he was on his feet, shuffling and straining to get away But there was no inch of yield and his ave the octopus an opportunity to pull his heels tighter under the overhang of the round rock The strength of the brute was prodigious and Bond could feel his balance going fast In a moment he would be pulled down flat on his face and then, hampered by the ht be alet at the beast

Bond snatched his dagger out of his belt and jabbed down between his legs But the overhang of the rock i his rubber skin Suddenly he was toppled over, lying on the sand At once his feet began to be drawn into a wide lateral cleft under the rock He scrabbled at the sand and tried to curl round to get within range with the dagger But the thick hu froe of panic, he re a hopeless weapon at that short range, but noas the only chance It lay on the sand where he had left it He reached for it and put up the safety-catch Thehis legs and probed each of his feet with the tip of the harpoon to find the gap between the The gun slipped between his er blindly

Iy ink rolled out of the cleft towards his face But one leg was free and then the other and he whipped them round and under him and seized the haft of the three-foot harpoon where it disappeared under the rock He pulled and strained until, with a rending of flesh, it ca, he got up and stood away fro down his face under the mask Above hiht to the surface and he cursed the wounded 'pus-feller' in its lair

But there was no tiun and struck out with the oing through thehis face a few inches above the sand and his head well down to streamline his body Once, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stingray as big as a ping-pong table shuffle out of his path, the tip of its great speckled wings beating like a bird's, its long horned tail strea that Quarrel had said that rays never attack except in self-defence He reflected that it had probably cos, or 'Mermaids' Purses' as the fishermen call them, because they are shaped like a pilloith a stiff black string at each corner, on the sheltered sandy botto fish lazed across theas himself When one followed beside him for at least a minute he looked up to see the white belly of a shark ten feet above hi airship Its blunt nose was buried inquisitively in his stream of air-bubbles The wide sickle slit of its lanced down at hireat scythe-shaped tail and htened a fa from about six pounds down to an infant of six ounces, frail and lu alhted themselves and shot off with streamlined jet propulsion

Bond rested for a moment about half way and then went on Now there were barracuda about, big ones of up to twenty pounds They looked just as deadly as he had relided above hiers' eyes They were curious about him and about his bubbles and they followed him, around and above him, like a pack of silent wolves By the ti up with the island therequietly, watchfully in and out of the opaque wall that enclosed hied under the black rubber but he could do nothing about them and he concentrated on his objective

Suddenly there was a longin the water above hi steeply upwards

It was the keel of the Secatur and Bond's heart thumped in his chest

He looked at the Rolex watch on his wrist It was three minutes past eleven o'clock He selected the seven-hour fuse from the handful he extracted from a zipped side-pocket and inserted it in the fuse pocket of the mine and pushed it home The rest of the fuses he buried in the sand so that if he was captured the mine would not be betrayed